- Obituary by Sir Martin Rees, Physics Today
- Obituary in The Guardian
- Obituary - from a creationist standpoint
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Sir Fred Hoyle Sir Fred Hoyle (June 24, 1915 in Yorkshire – August 20in Bournemouth, England, 2001) was a British astronomer, notable for a number of his theories that run counter to current astronomical opinion, and a writer of science fiction, including a number of books co-authored by his son Geoffrey Hoyle. He spent most of his working life at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge, and was director of the institute for a number of years.
Contribution to cosmogony An early paper of his made an interesting use of the Anthropic Principle. In trying to work out the routes of stellar nucleosynthesis, he observed that one particular nuclear reaction, the Triple-alpha process, which generated carbon, would require the carbon nucleus to have a very specific energy for it to work. The large amount of carbon in the universe, which makes it possible for life to exist, demonstrated that this nuclear reaction must work. Based on this notion, he made a prediction of the energy levels in the carbon nucleus that was later borne out by experiment. His co-worker William Fowler eventually won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 (with Subramanyan Chandrasekhar), but for some reason Hoyle’s original contribution was overlooked, and many were surprised that such a notable astronomer missed out. Fowler himself in an autobiographical sketch affirmed Hoyle’s pioneering efforts: The grand concept of nucleosynthesis in stars was first definitely established by Hoyle in 1946.
Rejection of the big bang While having no argument with the discovery of the expansion of the universe by Edwin Hubble, he disagreed on its interpretation: Hoyle (with Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi, who he had worked with on radar in World War II) argued for the universe being in a "steady state", with the continuous creation of new matter driving the expansion of the universe, rather than the universe beginning and expanding explosively in a "Big Bang". Ironically, he is responsible for actually coining the term "Big Bang" in a BBC radio programme, The Nature of Things while criticising the theory; the text was published in 1950. Continuous creation offered no explanation for the appearance of new matter, other than postulating the existence of some sort of "creation field", but in itself was no more inexplicable than the appearance of the entire universe from nothing; in the end the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation led to the nearly unanimous acceptance by astronomers (Hoyle being one exception) of the Big Bang theory. He did a series of radio talks on astronomy for the BBC in the 1950s; these were collected in the book The Nature of the Universe, and he went on to write a number of other popular science books. He wrote some science fiction; most interesting is The Black Cloud in which it transpires that most intelligent life in the universe takes the form of interstellar gas clouds, who are surprised that intelligent life can form on planets, and a television series A for Andromeda. In 1957 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and he was knighted in 1972.
Rejection of chemical evolution In his later years, Hoyle became a staunch critic of theories of chemical evolution to explain the naturalistic Origin of life. With Chandra Wickramasinghe, Hoyle promoted the theory that life evolved in space, spreading through the universe via panspermia, and that evolution on earth is driven by a steady influx of viruses arriving via comets. In his 1981/4 book Evolution from Space (co-authored with Chandra Wickramasinghe), he calculated that the chance of obtaining the required set of enzymes for even the simplest living cell was one in 1040,000. Since the number of atoms in the known universe is infinitesimally tiny by comparison (1080), he argued that even a whole universe full of primordial soup wouldn’t have a chance. He claimed: The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order. Hoyle infamously compared the random emergence of even the simplest cell to the likelihood that "a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein." Hoyle also compared the chance of obtaining even a single functioning protein by chance combination of amino acids to a solar system full of blind men solving Rubik's Cube simultaneously.
Other controversies Further occasions on which Hoyle aroused controversy included his questioning the authenticity of fossil Archaeopteryx and his condemnation of the failure to include Jocelyn Burnell in the Nobel Prize award recognising the development of radio interferometry and its role in the discovery of pulsars. Hoyle played an important role in determining the nature of the pulsing radio signals (from the pulsar), but was also excluded from the prize. Hoyle had a famous heated argument with Martin Ryle of the Cavendish Radio Astronomy Group about Hoyle's Steady State Universe which somewhat restricted collaboration between the Cavendish Radio Astronomy Group and the Institute of Astronomy during the 1960s. Honors Awards
Named after him
Fiction works
Non-fiction works
Books about Hoyle
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